Theodore Roosevelt on How You Kill a Lion

“Right in front of me, 30 yards off, it appeared, from behind the bushes which at first had screened him, the tawny, galloping form of a big, maneless lion. Crack, the Winchester spoke. The soft-nosed bullet plunged forward through his flank. The lion swerved so that I missed him with the second shot, but the third bullet went through his spine, and forward into his chest. Down he came, 60 yards off, his hindquarters dragging, his head up, his ears back, his jaws opening, his lips drawn up into a prodigious snarl, as he endeavored to turn to face us. His back was broken, but of this we could not at the moment be sure, and if it had been merely grazed he might have recovered and then, even though dying, his charge might have done mischief. So Kermit, Sir Alfred, and I, almost together, fired into his chest. His head sank and he died.”

The hunter was not a Minnesota dentist. The trophy was not Cecil. This was Theodore Roosevelt, bagging his first lion. Weeks after leaving the White House in March 1909, he set off on a yearlong safari in Africa with his son Kermit. He wrote about the trip the next year in “African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist,” published by Charles Scribner’s Sons and reviewed in The New York Times.

“The object of Mr. Roosevelt’s African expedition, it is explained repeatedly, was purely scientific,” Francis A. Collins wrote in the review. “It was undertaken primarily to collect birds, mammals, reptiles, and plants, and especially big game for the National Museum at Washington and the Natural History Museum of New York. No game of any kind was shot except for scientific purposes or for food.”

The book, first serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, was news before it even existed. Roosevelt was still president when Scribner’s snagged the contract, “which is considered among publishers to be the most promising in the money-making line that has been open for competition since the days when Kipling asked and got a flat rate of 25 cents a word,” The Times wrote in a front-page article.

Preparations for this first post-presidency jaunt were also carefully chronicled in The Times, and included accounts of Roosevelt trying out his tent in his backyard at Sagamore Hill, on Long Island, as well as accounts on the African side of things: “African sportsmen,” one article in The Times reported, “were highly gratified to learn that Mr. Roosevelt had refused the offer of the authorities to grant him a special hunting license that would have permitted him to kill game to an unlimited extent instead of confining himself to the two elephants, two rhinoceroses, two hippopotami, &c., of the regular license. Lions and leopards are classed as vermin, and consequently no license to kill them is required.”

Even then there were those who did not classify Cecil’s ancestors as vermin. Dr. William J. Long, a nature writer and former minister, was one. He criticized Roosevelt before and during the hunt — in particular scoffing at Roosevelt’s contention that he hunted for science, causing Roosevelt to respond that he was “not in the least a game butcher” but rather “a faunal naturalist,” The Times reported.

Dr. Long disagreed.

“The worst feature in the whole bloody business is not the killing of a few hundred wild animals in Africa,” Dr. Long said in an interview with The Times while Roosevelt was on his safari, “but the brutalizing influence which these reports have upon thousands of American boys. Only last week I met half a dozen little fellows in the woods. The biggest boy had a gun and a squirrel’s tail in his hat, and he called himself Bwana Tumbo. They were shooting everything in sight.”

“How could I convince them that their work was inhuman?” Dr. Long continued. “Is not the great American hero occupied at this time with the same detestable business?”

Meanwhile, Roosevelt was being serenaded in British East Africa at the “Nairobi Follies.”

A Miss Shooter at this event, The Times reported, sang of “Felis Leo,” who “lurked in his lonely lair, as African lions do”: